The online manpages for Perl have been divided into separate sections so
you can easily find what you are looking for without wading through
hundreds of pages of text. Since the top-level manpage is simply called
perl, the UNIX command "man perl"
should take you to it.[1]
That page in turn directs you to more specific pages. For example,
"man perlre"
will display the manpage for Perl's regular expressions.
The perldoc command may
work when the man (1) command won't, especially on module
documentation that your system administrator may not have felt
comfortable installing with the ordinary manpages.
On the other hand, your system administrator may have installed the Perl
documentation in hypertext markup language (HTML) format.

[1]
If you still get a humongous page when you do that, you're probably
picking up the ancient Release 4 manpage. Check your MANPATH for
archeological sites.

The Perl newsgroups are a great, if sometimes cluttered, source of information
about Perl.
comp.lang.perl.announce
is a moderated, low-traffic newsgroup
for Perl-related announcements. These often deal with new version releases,
bug fixes, new extensions and modules, and Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs).

The high-traffic comp.lang.perl.misc group discusses everything from
technical issues to Perl philosophy to Perl games and Perl poetry. Like Perl
itself,
comp.lang.perl.misc
is meant to be useful, and no question is too
silly to ask.[2]

[2]
Of course, some questions are too silly
to answer, especially those
already answered in the FAQ.

The comp.lang.perl.tk group discusses how to use the popular Tk toolkit
from Perl.
The comp.lang.perl.modules group is about the development and use of Perl
modules, which are the best way to get reusable code. There may be other
comp.lang.perl.whatever newsgroups by the time you read this; look
around.

One other newsgroup you might want to check out, at least if you're doing
CGI programming on the Web, is comp.infosystems.www.authoring.cgi.
While it isn't strictly speaking a Perl group, most of the programs
discussed there are written in Perl. It's the right place to go for
Web-related Perl issues.

If you have access to the World Wide Web, visit
the Perl homepage at http://www.perl.com/perl/.
It tells what's new in the Perl world, and contains source code and ports,
documentation, third-party modules, the Perl bugs database, mailing list
information, and more. This site also provides the CPAN multiplexer,
described later.

Also check out http://www.perl.org/, which is the homepage of the Perl Institute,
a non-profit organization dedicated to saving the world through serving
the Perl community.

The Perl Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) is a collection of questions and
answers that often show up on comp.lang.perl.misc. In many respects it
is a companion to the available books, explaining concepts that people
may not have understood and maintaining up-to-date information about such
things as the latest release level and the best place to get the Perl
source.

There is also a metaFAQ, which answers supercommon questions. It has
pointers to the current Perl distribution, various non-UNIX ports, and
the full FAQ. There may be other FAQs you will find useful--for example,
FAQs about non-UNIX ports, Web programming, or perltk.

Another FAQish sort of posting is the Perl Modules List, which keeps
track of all the various existing and proposed modules that various
folks have worked on, or will work on someday real soon now. Included
are the email addresses of people to bug, and much free advice on module
design. A must-read for people who don't want to reinvent either the
buggy whip or the wheel.

In the unlikely event that you should encounter a bug that's in Perl proper and
not just in your own program, you should try to reduce it to a minimal test case
and then report it with the perlbug program that comes with Perl.

Perl is distributed under either of two licenses (your choice). The
first is the standard GNU Copyleft, which means briefly that if you
can execute Perl on your system, you should have access to the full
source of Perl for no additional charge. Alternately, Perl may also be
distributed under the Artistic License, which some people find less
threatening than the Copyleft (especially lawyers).

Within the Perl distribution, you will find some example
programs in the eg/ directory. You may also find other tidbits.
Poke around in there on some rainy afternoon. Study the Perl source
(if you're a C hacker with a masochistic streak). Look at the test
suite. See how Configure determines whether you have the mkdir (2)
system call. Figure out how Perl does dynamic loading of C modules.
Or whatever else suits your fancy.

Learning Perl
by Randal Schwartz (published by O'Reilly & Associates) is a companion
to Programming Perl. It is more of a tutorial, whereas this book
is more of a reference. If the tutorial section of Programming Perl
is too short or assumes too much about your background, try Learning
Perl for a kinder, gentler introduction to the language. If you want to
learn more about Perl's regular expressions, we suggest Mastering
Regular Expressions, by Jeffrey E.F. Friedl (also published by
O'Reilly & Associates).

The AWK Programming Language, by Aho, Kernighan, and Weinberger
(published by Addison-Wesley), and sed & awk, by Dale Dougherty
(published by O'Reilly & Associates), provide an
essential background in such things as associative arrays, regular
expressions, and the general worldview that gave rise to Perl. They also
contain many examples that can be translated into Perl by the awk-to-perl
translator a2p or by the sed-to-perl translator s2p. These
translators won't produce idiomatic Perl, of course, but if you can't
figure out how to imitate one of those examples in Perl, the translator
output will give you a good place to start.